In the startup world there are a lot of misconceptions about what exactly a target market is, how to identify one and what you should do with it. And all too often the target is thought of as something that should be figured out after the product is built.

This thinking is absolutely backwards and has undoubtedly caused many otherwise great startups to completely fail.

In reality, the selection of your target market is the most important decision you will make. Your target should be determined before any code is written and even before any business decision is made. And once decided upon, your target should guide every subsequent decision you make.

Why is the target so important?

It’s important because you need to know the exact problem you’re solving, exactly who has that problem and how they want it solved. Otherwise you’ll end up targeting “people,” and having serious yet meaningless conversations about “what people want.”

Think of it this way, if you created a product that the average person wanted, it would be 10% ultra conservative, 10% radical liberal, mostly straight, a bit gay and liked by nobody.

In contrast, the product worth building is one that’s better than anything else in the world at solving a significant problem for a specific and accessible subset of people.

But how do you identify such a group and how do you evaluate which groups are better targets than others?

In the ten years I’ve spent in marketing and public relations, I’ve seen hundreds of targeting strategies play out. And after a while a very clear pattern emerges that differentiates the successes from the failures.

One of the first things you’ll see is that demographic targeting is entirely useless. There was a time when it made sense to narrow your focus by age, race, income, location, etc. But not anymore. If you’re marketing to a demographic, you’ll end up spending a lot of cash just to put an irrelevant message in front of an audience who could care less.

These days, targeting is about one thing: real people with real needs.

It’s one thing to make such a declaration, but it’s another to turn that into a target market worth basing your business on.

Here’s how you do it.

A strong target market comes down to three, and only three, variables: Needs, Hubs and Quantity.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Needs:
This gets at the fundamental driving question, “What problem are we solving?”

So often when answering this question, founders treat it as though problems just somehow exist in the world but the reality is that problems exist only within the minds of actual people. So to solve a real problem it is absolutely essential to understand the people who have that problem. You have to get to the point where you can clearly imagine how your product fits into their day, how it makes them feel, how it makes them more productive in their daily lives or even how it makes them more attractive to their preferred gender.

If you can clearly define that pain point and you can scope out a clear and simple solution, then you probably have something worth building. Otherwise, don’t bother.

To put it in quantifiable terms, think about the type of person would love your solution more than anybody else, and rank their response on a scale of 1-10 with 1= “That might be useful” and 10= “Thank god this exists.”

If you’re not reaching 8+, you need a better target, a better product, or both.

Hubs:
If you reach 8+ on Needs, then go on to the next two test, both of which are designed to determine if this profound problem is worth solving.

For your target to be viable, you have to be able to reach them. Fortunately these days, people tend to connect based on their needs and if you really solve their problem, they’ll be eager to share you with their networks.

For this you’re looking for any kind of influencer with a wide reach that your target trusts and that is accessible to you.

Some possible hub types include:

• Bloggers
• Trade publications
• Online or offline groups
• Professional associations
• Membership clubs
• Social Networks
• Prominent individuals

Such hubs are important because they will become your marketing channels when you’re ready to launch.

On a scale of 1-10, 1= “Yeah, I bet most of my targets use Facebook” and 10= “WOW. There’s like 100 major hubs and I could easily get to any one of them.”

Quantity:
If you scored 8+ on Needs and Hubs, there’s just one final test to verify this target is worth it: Quantity.

For this test, you’re just making sure you didn’t target too narrowly. To evaluate Quantity, make sure to take into account how many you can plausibly reach and how many of them are likely to pay your price for your solution.

On a scale of 1-10, 1= “Seems like there are quite a few” and 10= “My god, there are more of these people than I’d know what to do with.”

And that’s all there is to it.

When you find a target that reaches 8+ on all three variables, something really fascinating happens. Your entire strategy becomes abundantly clear. You’ll know exactly what problem you’re solving, what features to build and how to reach throngs of people who would love your product.

On the other hand, if you’re scoring lower on any of these points, you’re going to face a costly uphill battle that you might not be able to win.

Back in the day, launching a startup was all about the epic struggle of working 17-hour days fueled by the hope of becoming ramen-profitable.

For a long time, that’s how it had to be done because the startup ecosystem was a hard-scrabble frontier where survival required unrelenting perseverance and a substantial degree of all-in and double-down recklessness.

But that was then, and this is now.

Let’s face it. The Internet is no longer an untamed Wild West hospitable only to cowboys and outlaws. Instead it has become more like the early western cities where prudent entrepreneurs could see a need and stake a major claim.

These days, smart entrepreneurs recognize there is a method to the madness. It’s no longer about hope and hype. It’s about defining an important problem and testing a sensible solution in the real world with real people.

This is the great insight behind the Lean Startup Movement and it is why we developed the T Minus 30 offering at Conceivian that enables individuals with brilliant startup ideas to bring their core product to life in just one month and begin methodically testing and learning without the need to dive head-first into the unknown.

This is about more than sound advice for would-be founders, though. This is about how we see the startup game itself. Some will continue to see it as the domain of the wide-eyed, all-or-nothing enthusiasts. But many others will embrace the fact that the Internet is now about focused, methodical and strategic problem solving.

Hot off the presses, the latest Conceivian Trend Report dives into one of the biggest B2C transformations of our times: The recent and rapid shift from desktop to mobile.

It’s no great surprise that we’re all becoming increasingly dependent on our smartphones and tablets but what is truly surprising is rate of change. In fact, the last time we saw shift in B2C relations of this magnitude was in 1990s when the internet itself became a major force.

What’s perhaps equally surprising is how oblivious most established businesses are to these massive market shifts.

And with certain newly established hardware and software breakthroughs, the swift shift from desktop to mobile continues to accelerate as mobile matures into its full capabilities with its own unique (and better) consumer experience.

Find out why mobile commerce is on the rise and what you can (and should) do about it.

Download The Conceivian Trend Report: 3 Surprising Reasons Why Mobile Commerce is More Important Than You Think

It sounds like something out of Star Trek but NFC is just a fancy way of saying “Tap and Pay.”

Tap and Pay is exciting because it just might revolutionize how we pay.

Here’s how it works: Imagine you’re checking out at the grocery store but instead of pulling out your wallet, you grab your phone and just tap it on a special pad and it’s paid.

Starting in 2012, most new smart phones will come with NFC built in and you can bet that quite a few retailers will want to try it out.

It’s too early to tell if this will be the next big thing, but this is one trend we will be closely monitoring.

Once the world’s most popular browser, Internet Explorer 6 is dead. With U.S. usage sinking below 1% of the market, they’re calling the Time of Death at January 3, 2012 for the ten-year-old browser.

But this was no accidental death.

Microsoft has actually been trying to snuff IE6 for quite some time. On their own blog, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote:
“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away.”

So, why would the software behemoth be so eager to kill its own product?

Long story short, all browsers handle information differently, so to make a website look and act right web developers have to create slightly different versions for each browser.

Problem is, making a website work on IE6 is very time and labor intensive so most developers end up just wishing it would fade away.

Wish granted. With IE6 officially buried, developers can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

It does make one wonder though — what kind of a person would so stubbornly cling to such a painfully out-of-date browser that barely works anymore that you could replace with just two mouse clicks?

Whoever it is, they’re probably not any target market you’d want in the first place.

The web and mobile world is buzzing about HTML5, but what does this mean for you?

Let me break it down.

HTML is the language used to assemble websites. It’s what you use to tell the browser to make a word bold or to put the picture on the left hand side, etc.

And it hasn’t had a big update for 15 years — since before smart phones and before interactive multi-media stuff was all the rage. Which means there’s been a lot of MacGyver-ing going on to make it all work.

But no more.

HTML5 is built for today’s Internet and makes it possible to create far richer, seamlessly integrated multimedia experiences that work equally well on your desktop as they do on your tablet or phone.

There are also some exciting new advancements. For example, HTML5 allows for offline interaction with web pages and documents, geolocation is vastly improved and most exciting of all, drag and drop is now possible within websites.

Long story short, HTML5 can greatly expand and improve how your users see and interact with your content.

And for you that means you have a gigantic opportunity to get the technological jump on the competition by using the full potential of HTML5 to create far superior user experiences.

That’s the positive spin. On the flip side there’s the fact that some of your competitors are probably already eyeing HTML5 and just might get to it first.

Of course, you can stick with the functionality of HTML4 and your website will work just fine for many years to come, but you might not be happy with the results.